Horror, horror, everywhere...

On new year's eve (no capital letters for that swollen, arbitrary schmuck, oh no), never make the mistake of entering the godforsaken Weatherspoons which festers upstairs in Victoria Station.

You know the one.

On any given day, your presence within this pustule on Britain's arsehole is a frightening mistake. Find yourself tiptoeing in on December 31st, however, just as the country is shrieking its chorus of communal self-loathing, and you have unequivocally crashed the plane into the mountain.

And it's all your fault. Pilot, orchestrator, perpetrator — that's you. Post-9pm, late, waiting tetchily for a train to whisk you off to The Fun, your attempt to garner "maximum purchase" from the most pitiable of all evenings — via a snatched couple of shorts at the hands of "J.D." and his empire of cultural black holes — will end in traumatic epiphany.

A tractor beam for all the night's sorry disciples — the desperate hordes fervently watering the rotten N.Y.E sponge they will later squeeze dry — the joyless functionality of the place billows into an overwhelming, glutinous tide of despair.

A silent cloud of silt, filling the mouths of drowning cats.

Buffeted from entrance to bar to exit, the price of your complicit desire for lowest-common-denominator intoxication (proximity to train, bus or source of escape ÷ time x cash) is reflected back at you in the distended faces of your fellow droons.

There's no going back now. You've seen too much.

Soul forever sullied, you conclude thus: new year's eve on the tiles is Britain's collective punishment-wank. All doled up, camera-phones at the ready, righteously expectant of the prescripted avenues of tick-box hedonism which await, The Fun is systematically hunted down by a bloated, wheezing lynch-mob.

Twitching eyes and nervous laughs contrive to throttle the evening raw, until the dull saccharine tide finally foams up and over and through, and hysteric smiles gratefully pierce the repugnant wash.

A poisoned catharsis. A cowed paroxysm. A grotesque symphony of desperation.

Go on, flog that fetid horse — you're worth it.